Though a long poem, the book is interlarded with mixed genre elements, including a few treatises one on dung, another on literary narcissism and several essays, including little disquisitions on vipassana meditation, Whitman, C. S. Peirce, and Nancy Reagan.

Sweden's long-successful economic formula of a capitalist system interlarded with substantial welfare elements was challenged in the 1990s by high unemployment and in 2000-02 by the global economic downturn, but fiscal discipline over the past several years has allowed the country to weather economic vagaries.

It was interlarded with drooling appeals to children to ask their mommies to buy them succulent lollipops or chocolate bars or ice cream cones, while some smug child was licking at the aforementioned article with tempting expressions of pleasure.

"A dinner interlarded with a row of extra entrées, Roman punch, and hot dessert," Emily Post wrote in her original 1922 etiquette manual, "is unknown except at a public dinner, or in the dining-room of a parvenu."

She had a trick of using high-sounding phrases, interlarded with exaggerated expressions, the kind of stuff ingeniously nicknamed tartines by the French journalist, who furnishes a daily supply of the commodity for a public that daily performs the difficult feat of swallowing it.